by Brand, Max
“I’m goin’ to get myself right out of this,” he told himself aloud. But with his hand on the lead-rope knot he paused again. He found that his fingers were only fumbling blindly at the knot while his mind was struggling with the greater problem of the mill and the mystery that it contained. If there were a sheriff in Blue Water, he ought to be interested, also.
Suppose a man were to take off most of his clothes and slide into the river and float down past the mill-would an entrance be found, or would the swimmer find himself drawn down the mill race into the ponderous sway of the wheel?
“I wouldn’t be such a fool as to try the dodge, anyway,” said Bill Naylor to himself.
But in spite of these good and intelligent resolutions, he found himself standing finally on the bank of the stream, peering down at the mill. He could not see everything clearly; the bank hid a good deal. But now he was sitting down and pulling off his clothes!
He stripped to a pair of drawers. In the water he would not want the weight of a heavy Colt revolver. Instead, he unfastened his hunting knife from his belt and took the leather sheath between his teeth. Then he waded into the stream. He took a last look around. He saw the stars coming out, and the greatness of the Blue Water Mountains, and the whirling of the river currents.
“I’m the greatest fool in the world!” said Bill Naylor to himself.
Then he dived into the water and swam down the stream. When he came close, he moored himself to the shore under a tangle of shrubbery. The mill was right above him. A yellow streak of lamplight came out of a window and rippled away across the water of the creek. The bumping and groaning of the wheel was not far away, and the voices of two men were talking.
One of them said: “I says to Murphy: ‘I don’t like the turn of your nose and the color of your eye.’ And Murphy, he says to me: ‘I’m goin’ to fix you so’s you’ll like ‘em better.’ And then we went at it, and the first thing I know, a gent standing by trips me up, and I go down flat and knock my wind out, and Murphy, he throws himself at me. He was so happy that he was howling like a dog. Whining and howling like a dog, sort of choked, because his teeth were grinding together. And I managed to turn around and bring up one knee, and the bone of my knee whanged him on the side of the chin, and it opened him up like a knife, and the blood was all over everything. Murphy yells out that I’ve cut his throat, and it looked like it. And he gets up and tries to run, and I get up, and the boys kick at Murphy and make him turn around and fight. But he was scared when he seen how much blood was running out of him, and he couldn’t hardly hold up his hands. I took and beat the devil out of him. I got him against the wall, and the back of his head bumped the wall just when my fist hit his chin, and he went out like a light, and that’s how he come to have that big cut on his chin, like you was talking about.”
“That’s a good way to get a cut on the chin,” said the other voice. “I heard tell that he was kicked by a hoss.”
The first speaker laughed.
“Well, he was kicked, all right. He was kicked by my knee, and it laid him right open like a knife.”
“I’ll tell you what I seen Murphy do in Las Gatas,” said the other.
“Have you got some pipe tobacco?”
“No.”
“Wait till I get my pouch. Blast a pouch, anyway. When I just carried the sack the way I bought it, it was always in my pocket. But when I take and carry a pouch, I ain’t never got it with me.”
The voice passed away, still speaking.
“Wait a minute,” said the other. “I can tell you where Smithers left his tobacco down here in the basement.”
That voice, also, diminished, went out.
Bill Naylor pulled himself up through the shrubbery like an eel.
“I’ll take a look and know what the thing’s like, and then I’ll get out of here,” he said to himself. Four men right out on guard. Six men, I’ll tell Barry Christian. It’s a job that even he wouldn’t like to tackle.”
He found himself looking onto a sort of basement veranda that ran under the higher, main veranda overhead. The wet paddles of the mill wheel were rising, half revealed, a little to the right, each one coming up with a shudder of effort, like a living thing — shuddering, gleaming in the pallor of the lamp light, and almost stopping at the height of the rise, and then lurching foward again with renewed strength. Whatever work that wheel was doing, the utmost of its strength was being used.
“Whatever they’re doing, they ain’t making flour,” said Bill Naylor.
Across the veranda he saw an open window and a closed door. The two men who had been talking had probably gone in through the door.
“Some fools,” said Bill Naylor, “would try to get in through that window.”
And then, as if in a story, he actually found himself quaking and shuddering, but peering through the window into a cluttered room that seemed to be filled with nothing but rags and scraps of old paper.
He set his teeth. An electric chill which, he told himself, was like the chill of death, ran over him. A moment later he had ducked through the window and was stealing foward, cursing the rustling of the paper. A lantern, with the wick turned low, hung from the wall. He crossed the room, tried the opposite door, and found that it was not locked.
He peeked through. There was nothing but darkness. It closed over him. It shut like water over his lips, and he could not breathe.
“I’m a fool,” Bill Naylor told himself. “What do I think I’m doing?”
No voice of the spirit answered him.
Of course, the thing for him to do was to get back quickly. Get back while the way was open.
He started to open the door through which he had just passed, and inside of it he saw two men striding through the waste paper. He pressed the door soundlessly shut and leaned against the wall, his heart going fast.
Suppose they found him, naked, dripping, what would he say? That he was searching for a parcel!
Well, they’d give him a parcel. They’d give him a parcel of buckshot that would blow his head off, and the fish in Blue Water Creek could dine on what was left of him.
“Fish food,” said Bill Naylor. “That’s what I am. Fish food. I’m such a fool that even the fish would laugh at me. That’s what I am. I’m a simple fool, is all I am.”
He fumbled foward along the wall and opened another door. He got it ajar half an inch, and, peering through, he saw a little printing press at work, with a bearded, spectacled, clerical-looking gentleman leaning over one of its products, peering at it through a magnifying glass that was held close to his eye. Other products of the press were scattered on the floor, trampled brutally under foot, and yet all of them looked astonishingly like coin of the United States — neat little ten-dollar bills.
That door slid out of the fingers of Bill Naylor and closed with a slight jarring sound. He knew where he was now. And he knew what sort of people make counterfeit money. Any one who has anything to do with the making or the pushing of the “queer” is apt to be a hardy soul.
Well, if they found him in the place, they would simply finish him, that was all.
He fumbled along the wall until his hip struck another doorknob. Carefully turning it, he opened upon another deep well of blackness. It seemed to him that it was deep, that a musty smell was rising to him from a great pit, and he put foward his bare foot with caution. The sole of his foot rubbed on the rough surface of bricks. He made another step, and another. There was no pit. That had been all something of the mind, a mere fiction.
But there was something important, something significant about the bricks. Then he remembered. The floor of the cellar room about which Barry Christian had spoken was paved with bricks, not floored with wood or left as dank earth. He was in the very room, therefore, in which the parcel was hidden.
Or were there two rooms paved with bricks?
“Sure there are!” said Bill Naylor to his soul. “There’s a thousand rooms paved with bricks in this place. And I could fumble a thousand
years in the dark and not find anything.”
He wanted a smoke with a tremendous yearning. He felt that he could steady all his nerves and make his brain work if he could only smoke.
He moistened his dry lips, found the wall, and began to feel his way along it. He encountered another door. Then he found a niche set back from the rest of the floor.
That was the room! There was just such a corner niche in the room which Christian had described to him.
He got down on his knees and began to try every brick. He tried a thousand bricks, and he could not budge one of them. He needed tools, he felt — took and lantern light.
Then he used both hands and worked patiently, with strength, on every brick. The skin was rubbing off the tips of his fingers on the roughness of the bricks and the mortar, and then–a brick rocked a trifle under the pressure he gave it. A moment later it was up!
Another and another gave way. He thrust his hand down into the cavity, and his hand touched the snaky, slippery smoothness of oiled silk. The hole was not big enough. He had to widen it still more before he stood up, trembling, with the prize in his hands.
His brain was whirling so that he could not at once determine on a way to get out of the place. But at length he remembered his original course.
He got through the door into the darkened room. Again, through a splinter of light, he recognized the apartment in which the press was kept; he could hear the muffled clanking of the machinery.
They had nerve, fellows like these — right on the edge of a town to run a press like this and use the water power to operate it! They had brains and they had luck, or they would soon be closed down.
He opened the door on the room whose floor was littered with waste paper. No man was in it. He went stealthily across the floor. There was the open window beyond which ran the veranda, and beyond the veranda was the black of the swirling river.
He was nearly at the window when suddenly, without the sound of a door being opened, a voice behind him said:
“Goin’ to take a swim, Pete?”
“Uh-huh,” said Bill Naylor, and walked straight past the window to the door. He opened it as the man behind him said:
“Watch out for the snags. I wouldn’t swim this time of day, no matter what the chief says.”
Bill Naylor said nothing. He stepped out there into the darkness with one strong, yellow ray of lamplight from an upper window streaming down and rippling in pale gold across the face of the stream.
The two who had been talking on the veranda were no longer there. Naylor slipped through the brush. He walked up the edge of the stream, crouching low, as if there were a strong sun to light him, and eyes spying on his every movement.
He reached the horse. Still he could not believe that he had accomplished the thing.
He donned his clothes and lighted a match to examine the contents of the parcel. Then he remembered his promise, that he would not look inside. He remembered, too, that priceless advice — to make a step at a time.
Well, there was something in that. There was something in that worth more than gold and diamonds. The full beauty of the saying still was dawning on the soul of Bill Naylor. A step at a time, and he could climb all the mountains in the world.
He wrapped up the parcel again, dropped it into a saddlebag, and mounted.
CHAPTER V
Crow’s Nest
WHEN he got back to the shack in the woods, two days later, in the afternoon, he found Barry Christian walking up and down in front of the lean-to, smoking a cigarette. Christian’s greeting was a marvel of nonchalance.
“Good time, brother?” was all he asked.
“It was all right,” said Bill Naylor, rejoicing in equal calm. “Those bozos are printing some queer up there. There’s about a million of ‘em littered all around.”
“Are there?” asked Christian indifferently.
“And here’s that parcel,” said Naylor.
Well, the nerves of Barry Christian were of the best steel, but the shock of pleasant suprise was too great for him to keep all emotion concealed. He could not help that flash of the eyes and that upward jerk of the head.
He took the parcel and unwrapped it right under the eyes of Bill Naylor. It contained only three small packages. One was of unset jewels. The other two were well-compacted sheafs of greenbacks.
Christian divided that loot into two heaps of equal size. Then he pushed them out on the top of a fallen log that lay across the door of the shack.
“Take either half you want, Bill,” said he.
Naylor walked up to the treasure and stared down at it. Then he looked at Christian.
Bill Naylor felt that he was going to be a fool again. He could tell by the tremor of nerves up his spine. And suddenly the words came flooding out of his throat, past the unwilling tightness of his jaws.
“You grabbed this honey, and you cached it,” he said. “I just went and collected it for you; that’s all.”
Barry Christian stared at him with troubled eyes.
“It’s all right,” said Bill Naylor. “You take that and put it in your kick. I’ve had plenty of cash out of you already. Take that and forget about my little job.”
“No,” said Christian in a queer, small voice. “I won’t forget.”
He wrapped up the money slowly, his eyes fixed on the distance. There was something in all this which baffled the great Barry Christian. It might mean money in his pocket, but there was something about it that he did not like.
Naylor wondered what it could be. There was something about what he himself had done — he, Bill Naylor — that Christian did not like. And that was strange! What had he done except do the most dangerous job he had ever tackled in his life? He had done that job, and he had got away with it. What more did Christian want?
This problem disturbed the mind of Bill Naylor. He was shaken literally to his soul with wonder.
He went off to cut some wood for the cooking of supper, and all the while that he was cutting the wood he was saying to himself: “What’s wrong?”
But he solved the puzzle by merely deciding that he was just a “dumb mug,” and that the case was over his head.
After supper they sat about in the gloaming, and he told Barry Christian everything. You could talk to a fellow like Christian. You could even say how afraid you were. With a fellow like Christian it was always better to be out in the open and not try to put anything over. So Bill Naylor didn’t try to put anything over or play the hero. He told the truth.
He found that it was pleasant to tell the truth. He had never talked so much truth before, in such a short space, in all the days of his life. When you tell the truth, you don’t have to work the old brain. You just sit still and see things again the way they were. You see them clearly, and the re-seeing is a good deal of fun. He even told how he had repeated all the way: “A step at a time.”
“How old are you, Bill?” asked Christian.
“I’m old enough to know better.”
“No, I’m serious. How old are you?”
“Thirty. Old enough to know a lot better.”
“Young enough to learn,” said Christian. “Young enough to learn a lot.”
“A step at a time?”
“Yes,” said Christian. “A step at a time, of course. Until you start jumping instead of stepping.”
And yet Christian did not seem altogether pleased. All through the story he was squinting at the narrator as though he were seeing things at a great distance. And Bill Naylor was amazed indeed.
Before they turned in, Christian said: “You know Sheriff Dick Williams?”
“That hombre back there in the Crow’s nest?”
“Yes.”
“I know him. But what’s more, he knows me.”
“Well, they have nothing on you just now.”
“No. But they can always dig something up. You know what they are like.”
“I know. But would you go and talk to him for me?”
“Yeah. And
why not?”
“Suppose you drop in and see the sheriff and ask him what he would do if the ghost of Barry Christian dropped in and had a chat with him. And while you’re in Crow’s Nest, find out how things are going with Duff Gregor, will you?”
“I’ll make the trip tomorrow,” said Bill Naylor.
He went over the next morning, jogging his horse. He had a strange sense of comfort that ran all through his being. He felt indeed that he could look any man in the world in the eye? Why? Well, because he had fetched that parcel back to Christian without so much as looking at the contents — and because he had refused to take his split of the stolen money. He never had done such a thing before in all his days. He could not recognize himself. It seemed that a ghost wearing his name must have performed these things.
When he got into the Crow’s Nest, he saw the sunshine gleaming on the big hotels that faced each other from the divided peaks of the double mountain, and the town lying in the dimness of the hollow between.
He went by the Merchants & Miners Bank, which Henry Wilbur had built into such a great institution. Wilbur had done much for it, and the spectacular robbery which had been performed by Christian and Duff Gregor, parading as Jim Silver, had done still more. The robbery had advertised that bank all over the West, and men knew that Henry Wilbur had been on the point of sacrificing his personal fortune, and even his house and the books in his library for the sake of reimbursing his depositors. Well, such things make a bank strong. A good many people swore that they never would do banking of any kind from this time forward except through honest Henry Wilbur.
Well, there is a strength in honesty. It keeps you out of jail, for one thing.
Bill Naylor thought of that as he pulled up his horse in front of the jail. He had dismounted, and was about to tie his horse at a hitch rack when the man he wanted spoke just beside him, saying:
“Hello, Bill Naylor. I thought we’d always have to fetch you here. Didn’t know that you’d come of your own accord!”
CHAPTER VI
Gathering News